Review of Endi Bogue Hartigan’s POOL [5 CHORUSES]

Red fire trucks through the glass
doors—doors the size of fire trucks—

suburban banners for the sake of banners:
cartoonish sunrise, frog.

There is not just one there is not just
one there are many—

What do you like? What do you like?

Portland,
Oregon poet Endi Bogue Hartigan’s second trade poetry collection, Pool [5 choruses], winner of the
Omnidawn Open competition, is constructed out of the idea of simultaneousness, both
in speech and being, as an exploration into the polyphonic lyric multitude. Her
poems embrace multiple voices and perspectives that works to overlap, even as the
book is constructed in a fairly linear fashion, making her explorations less
about overlap per se than about threads that wrap in, around and through each
other like water. In the final section of the abecedarian poem “anniversaries
walking,” she loops back around, her twenty-seventh section titled the same as
the first, returning back to “a.,” as she writes: “Simultaneous to her, the
thought of her in real time—which even she can think / about—sideways, through
a flute.” The second section of the same poem reads:

b.

The anniversary of seeing children
swinging from trees remembering swinging from trees is at heart a bleed of
anniversaries. If you were born Christmas Day you share a birthday with Isaac
Newton and Sissy Spacek simultaneously. Inlets bleed.

Referencing
the anniversary of 9/11 (among other anniversaries), the poem subtitle
announces that the piece is meant “to be read by 27 voices,” something I do
hope has been performed, looping and stretching in such a compact overlap of
simultaneous voice. If not everything heard can be understood, where does
meaning go, or is the effect of the choral collage and mix of voices the goal? In
a short interview included in the press release, she seems to respond to the
question, opening her response with a discussion of her poem “chorus inventing
lilies”:

With each of my entries in this poem, I
found myself adding these short, parceled-out, elucidations and commands, and I
realized it was a different voice. The chorus kind of talked back. Overall, I
think one of the most challenging and surprising aspects of writing this book
was that it was a kind of tug of conscience for me to enter from a new place
formally with each poem, in order to necessarily do my hearing as well as what
I didn’t hear justice. The choral
gave me new ways in where voices emerge and differentiate and interstice and
expand, but I didn’t want its force to be the force of a crowd. I had to find a
way for language to be able to reference actual lives in the context of what is
not referenced too, to mention things unspeakably embedded and complex in
actual lives, with actual camellia bushes and layoffs and children and hopes
and the 9/11 “anniversary,” which I didn’t want to merely report in stillness
or claim an unfounded authority of report. I felt the danger of both over-speaking
and under-speaking, and as a result the particular entrance point for lyric
felt like a very tenuous easily slipping place; there is a series of poems
necklaced throughout the book that explore this idea of “slippage,” which were
especially challenging to write because I was writing at and from that point at
the same time. I think one reason the chorus allowed me to navigate here is
that although the chorus is active, it is distinct from the actors. The chorus
is there beside the actors while in the same viewer space.

The
five sections that make up her Pool [5
choruses]—“gallop,” “lily tally,” “Lola, backstage,” “yellow yellow yellow”
and “office of water”—are built of poems that extend and pull apart the line,
composing lengthy linear stretches in the smallest of spaces, writing poems
both choral as in the multiple/polyvocal, and in the elegantly lyric. As she
writes in the poem “Flurry series,” subtitled “4 choruses”: “The tree
transferred choruses / from eaves to branches—from branches to eaves— / in
their slippers and gowns, in their suits and linings and cowboy boot / dresses,
in prints and in tresses and costumed sounds—[.]” What appeals most about these
poems is how much manages to happen in such a small sequence of moments, moving
one to the next to the next, each one sending ripples that continue for miles. Where
Hartigan shines is in the lyric disjunction, composing poems that work to explore
the seriousness of real events and the weight of how the world sometimes
happens to be, all while managing a lightness of line and a spark of phrasing
that bounces. (April 2014)

Reviewer
bio: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious
capital city, rob mclennan
currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry,
fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was
longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes
and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty
Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). He regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com